And the Girls Met Santa and All Was Good

I miss writing. I love December, but things are pretty uncreative around here if I'm not even finding the time to blog!

The silver lining is that January is usually cold and dark and depressing; the excitement of the holiday season is over and there's nothing immediate to look forward to. By "holiday season," I mean September through December, including my birthday, Ellie's birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Advent, Christmas, and New Year's Eve. What's not to love?!

Wait, I forgot the lining. After all that excitement, January is a bit of a let-down. But this year I can promise myself that, amidst all the exercising I'll be doing, I will also be taking time to WRITE again, which makes me feel happy and good in ways that nothing else really touches.

So, yay for January!

In the meantime, here's a writer joke.

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his English class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

It's Time for Christmas Letters

I can't blog right now! I'm writing our family Christmas letter! This year, again, I can't bring myself to write neat paragraphs describing our year. (Sarahlynn likes to read. Paul has a new job. Ellie is cute. Ada was born! The end.) So I searched around online, and I'm trying to write a menu that describes our year, as though we're a restaurant.

For example:

Entrees
Haggis, served family style (we took a 10-day family vacation to Scotland in June)

And so forth.

Do you know that some people think that writing longer things takes more time? Unless we're talking about a novel vs. a postcard, I find the opposite to be true. It's hard, very hard for me to edit, refine, pare down, keep the meaning without all the words. Words, words, words are easy.